Anne Percoco's "Indra's Cloud" floats down the Yamuna River

The sacred river Yamuna is worshipped by India's Hindus as a goddess. It is said that anyone who bathes in her sacred waters will be free of the torments of death. The Yamuna is also India's most polluted river, for it bears industrial and chemical waste, untreated sewage, plastic trash, and barge fuel.

A young American artist, Anne Percoco, was inspired to make a sculpture that called attention to both these aspects of the Yamuna-and to exhibit it not in an art gallery, but on the river itself.

"Indra's Cloud" was made of more than a thousand plastic water bottles that had been used by mostly foreign students attending a yoga retreat. Percoco sewed them together into a translucent cloudlike shape, and this mythic barge was then paddled through the river at the city of Vrindavan.

After the journey, the sculpture was dismantled and the bottles used to grow sapling trees. The yoga center began using refillable glass water dispensers instead of plastic bottles.